• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 5, 2024

Foursquare will give advertisers the ability through data to confirm whether or not ads influence an increase in consumer spending in stores. The product, Sales Impact, will launch in September this year.

This capability is now being tested with a handful of companies. Features like this can influence how media buys are made, and demonstrate how companies should bring their own data (BYOD) and how this will change attribution and targeting.

“Think about your own browsing behavior,” said Michele Morelli, head of marketing and communications at Foursquare, a privately held company. “When people think about going into stores to either evaluate a product or pass the time, we can now tie whether or not advertising improved in-store purchases.”

Morelli said Foursquare developers built an attribution methodology and partnered with data partners that can combine it with transactional and financial data. Previously, the company only analyzed whether it drove in-store traffic.

She also pointed to data released by Emarketer earlier this year. The firm forecast that total retail sales for the 2024 holiday season will reach $1.37 trillion -- up 4.8% YoY. It’s not clear whether the percentage of increase factors in inflation or declining consumer confidence.

The prediction was released well before Friday’s weak jobs report that reignited recession fears on Wall Street -- sending stocks lower, with The Dow closing down 600 points, the Nasdaq dropping 2.4% and the S&P selling off 6% from its recent all-time high.

In May, a report surfaced that Foursquare laid off about 25% of its workforce, ending divisions that supported Visits, OCF, and Foursquare City Guide. The report also referred to the company pausing work on initiatives related to Mobile Developers Tools, Geode, and the current version of FSQ Insights. That was in May 2024.

Changing direction is not uncommon for companies. Nor is determining how to use technology to support change.

Foursquare has been using various artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies for years to determine the location of a person, but has not yet moved into generative AI. That will come.

Advertisers are still interested in protecting consumer privacy, but the change in Google’s strategy presented in July suggest a need for more competition in the market, she said.

“It didn’t impact Foursquare, because we’ve been thinking about this for some time dealing with location data,” she said. “There’s an evolving view of attribution.”

It's important for CMOs to have conversations with a company’s CFO on how marketing and advertising drives a project forward. Companies want to see bigger goals driven by less budgets.

“I started to see marketers trying to be more provocative,” she said. “There’s greater connectivity between what is considered an impression and the ability to understand the market’s expense.”

Sales Impact is part of the evolution that will make attribution smarter with support from AI and ML in real time to optimize spend.

Most know Foursquare from its consumer location app days, but company executives quickly realized they could take that data to build an incredibly power service for marketers and advertisers to make business decision.

When consumers use a ride-share app, they likely rely on Foursquare technology. Those who are looking for a home and want to locate coffeehouses in the surrounding neighborhood would be likely to rely on Foursquare technology, while marketers that are conquesting or want to know whether their digital ads drive in-store traffic are likely to rely on Foursquare technology.